Polymorphic_embed - polymorphic Embeds in Ecto

mathieuprog

Hello

I published a library that brings support for polymorphic/dynamic embeds in Ecto.

Ecto’s embeds_one macro requires a specific schema module to be specified. This library removes this restriction by dynamically determining which schema to use, based on data to be stored (from a form or API) and retrieved (from the data source).

Example use case:

Say you have a Reminder schema. A reminder has a set date and text, but also specific fields whether it is an email reminder or sms reminder. Instead of adding and mixing all the email- and sms-related fields together in the Reminder schema, where one set of fields or the other are null values, you can add a polymorphic embed, only containing the relevant sms or email fields. The polymorphic embed also supports its own changeset validations.

See example code and usage in Readme file

https://github.com/mathieuprog/polymorphic_embed

Inspired by ecto_poly library.

16 comments

#ecto #library #schema #polymorphism #embedded_schema #polymorphic_embed

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2025-07-09 12:44:02 UTC

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thomas.fortes

Awesome, I’ve been working exactly with this problem this past week, my solution was built with an Ecto custom type, it works perfectly, but there’s a lot of boilerplate…

From the docs it seems like it will be almost a plug and play with just some minor adjustments, will open a branch and try it

Edit: Yeah, looking at the source of the lib it does what I was doing manually with a custom type, it took zero modifications in the code aside of changing the field type in the schema and configuring the lib, so far all the tests passed.

Post #1

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mathieuprog

Support for LiveView forms has been added thanks to the quality contribution of Mathias!
Support for primary keys has been added

The latter may introduce breaking changes, therefore Polymoprhic Embed version has been bumped to 2.0.0

Migration from 1.x to 2.x is easy:

Make sure that every existing polymorphic embedded_schema contains the setting @primary_key false

Post #8

mathieuprog

I imagine this is a pretty common need, and that many codebases would either have a schema with sets of null values, or end up having their own custom Ecto type implementations.

This library indeed provides a custom Ecto Type that determines the right embed schema to use, based on params to cast. Nice thing is, you can tell PolymorphicEmbed that the presence of specific params identifies a certain schema – no need for a “type” field in the params:)

In addition to the advantages that a library offers (get rid of boilerplate code in the app, reusable code across projects, bugfixes, …), it comes with some nice features:

As mentioned, detect which types to use for the data being cast-ed, based on fields present in the data (no need for a type field in the data)
Run changeset validations when a changeset/2 function is present (when absent, the library will introspect the fields to cast)
Support for nested polymorphic embeds
Support for nested embeds_one/embeds_many embeds
Display form inputs for polymorphic embeds in Phoenix templates

Added those features in the Readme file.

Post #2

mathieuprog

Version 3.0.0 has been released!

We now encourage the use of polymorphic_embeds_one/2 and polymorphic_embeds_many/2 macros to define your polymorphic embeds.

If you’re curious as to why: a field containing a polymorphic list of embeds defaulted to nil before version 3. To follow embeds_many/3 we should default to []. This can only be done by forcing the :default option of the field/3 to [] (ie we can’t configure this in the Type). I added the new macros in order to set these kind of defaults setting up the field for the polymorphic embeds.

Thanks to Alexandre @Matsa59 for his contribution which led to this update!

Post #9

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munksgaard

This seems to work the first time I select something. But if I then change my selection, it doesn’t actually change anything. Even in my handle_event I’m not seeing the updated selection.

Post #16